In many areas of electronics, sensor technology and microsystems engineering, the production requirements give rise to a constraint for increasing miniaturization and for increasing productivity by joining together subsystems in more highly integrated structures. The trend toward ever more highly integrated and more compact designs leads, for structural reasons, to the individual components being heated ever increasingly per unit area on account of the ever increasing performance and the power thus generally consumed. In order to ensure an effective dissipation of heat from the components particularly in the semiconductor power field, components are linked to heat sinks, for example. The dissipation of heat is determined here by the contact and thus the thermal resistance Rth between the component and the heat sink. In this case, the contact areas of the components and of the heat sink can be contacted directly or by means of a thermal paste. This leads to varying dissipation of heat.